Stephen Antonakos' exhibition "FORM COLOR SPACE" curated by Greek curator Lola Siena Koutoudi opens this Thursday, February 24, from 6-8pm at the FIAF / French Institute Alliance Française.
Greece in USA's founding director Dr. Sozita Goudouna who fostered the dialogue for the organization of this exhibition by Ms Koutoudi, moderates a discussion on the work of the notable artist with art writer and editor David Ebony and Naomi S. Antonakos, Director of Stephen Antonakos Studio LLC.
"Essentially a classicist in the Constructivist tradition, Antonakos has revealed the poetry of neon." - Irving Sandler, Art Historian, NY, 2009
Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013) called his work "real things in real spaces in the here and now." There are no representations, allusions, symbols. Throughout his work, the forms, colors, and compositions are clear - but their experience in time and space is open and various. The crucial placements of his incomplete geometries allow the forms to be completed in the viewer's imagination - to be sensed kinetically as well as visually. He considered that the viewer's experience was what completed a work of art.
For more information and ticket click HERE.
ABOUT STEPHEN ANTONAKOS
Stephen Antonakos was born in the small Greek village of Agios Nikolaos in 1926 and moved with his family to New York in 1930. In the late 1940s, after returning from the US Army, he established his first studio in Manhattan’s fur district. From the early 1960s until his death in 2013, he worked and lived in studios in SoHo.
His work with neon since 1960 has lent the medium new perceptual and formal meanings in direct 3-D indoor installations; painted Canvases; Walls, back-lit Panels with painted or gold surfaces; Rooms; Chapels; and the architecturally scaled Public Works in the USA, Europe, and Japan. Other important practices include the conceptual packages; collages; Travel Collages; Artist’s Books; the silver and white Reliefs; prints; and, since 2011, several series of framed and 3-D Gold Works.
Since 1958, Antonakos’s work has been seen in hundreds of solo and group shows in New York, around the USA, Europe, and Japan. For almost every exhibition, he created new work. He received the Prize for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2009) and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY (2000), the National Academy Museum (2011) and the Greek America Foundation (2011).
GREECE IN USA is under the Auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture and is dedicated to offering innovative and unique programs in education and the arts, all exploring the evolving diversity and richness of Greek and Cypriot cultures. The New York non-profit organization seeks to shape and envision the image of contemporary Greece in the United States beyond existing stereotypes and to generate new thinking about the arts and promote cross-cultural dialogue through partnerships and new platforms of creation, artists and curators. More at: https://greeceinusa.com
